Fear gives us permission

Fear can breed anger. Anger can curdle into hatred. Hatred can decay into repulsion.

For Jewish people to fear persecution and oppression is understandable. The long history of antisemitism and its specific, horrifying instantiation in the Holocaust would sensibly cause fear for anyone.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th and killed more than 1400 people, the attack reinforced this sensible fear. Here was another moment when another’s hatred of Jewish people had resulted in mass Jewish death and suffering.

But the chain that I laid out above was already well-reinforced in the attitudes of many Israeli people toward Palestinians. Fear to anger, anger to hatred, hatred to revulsion. And the Israeli attack on the people of Gaza had begun. Israelis have already killed more than 5000 Palestinians in Gaza through airstrikes. The Israeli government has ordered everyone in the northern half of Gaza to evacuate to the southern half. Many homes and buildings have been destroyed. Israel has cut off electricity, water, and food to the Palestinians. Many have justified these actions as “the cost of war,” but they fail to reckon with the fact that the Israeli government has created the conditions in Gaza, and so bears responsibility for the basic needs of the Palestinians there.

Israel took the lands and demolished the homes of Palestinians throughout historical Palestine and forced the displaced people into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip in particular is a massive refugee camp created by the actions of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers over the last 75 years. The Israeli government therefore has a humanitarian obligation to provide access to food, water, and electricity for the Palestinians it has forced to live there. Israel’s decision to attack Gaza and root out Hamas does not void that obligation.

Fear makes us act in ways that do not align with our values, and to avoid cognitive dissonance, we exempt human beings from our values in order to permit our inhumane treatment. Such it is with the Israeli state. I am certain that those who make up the state and those who live in Israel would say that they value peace, safety, and human life. It is only because their fear enables the demonization of all Palestinians that they can justify their treatment of the Palestinian people.

Hamas’s October 7th attack was reprehensible. Those responsible should be brought to justice. But neither Hamas in specific nor the Palestinian people in general have the ability to inflict death on the scale that Israel is in Gaza right now. We must condemn Hamas. We must ensure that Israel has the right to protect itself. But we must never allow those facts to void the humanity of the Palestinian people who have the same rights to protection, nourishment, and thriving that the Israeli people do, that we all do.